Newsjacking for the music industry

Newsjacking is the practice of responding to a breaking story while it is still moving, with a take only someone in your position could give. Done well, it buys reach that paid promotion cannot: the audience is already reading about the story, and an opinion from a working professional stands out against a feed of restated press releases. Done late or generically, it does nothing, and the window on most stories is hours, not days.

These nine guides are written for the people who do that work in music: independent artists, record labels, music PR agencies, artist managers, playlist pitchers, radio promoters, music marketers, music tech founders, and sync and licensing teams. Each one covers the story types that role actually encounters, the angles that work for them, a short playbook, and the sources worth watching. If you are new to the whole idea, start with the guide for your own role, then read one adjacent to it: the angles overlap more than you might expect.

For the underlying method, read the free newsjacking playbook, which sets out the four-signal scoring framework NewsJack uses to score 200+ stories every morning. And if you are weighing up monitoring tools, the tool comparisons cover how a music-specific monitor differs from generic alerts and pitching databases.